This is a guide to National Geographic's Our World, the graded reader series of 54 books from Level 1 to Level 6. It seems that the first level is for small children just starting elementary school, but as the level goes up, the series books become more and more appropriate for foreign learners of English, especially junior high school or even high school students. Actually, Lee Wagner's Better Lives with Bionics from Level 6 is worth reading due to both the subjunctive mood and the theme of modern technology, like "Imagine if you lost a hand. Wouldn't you wish for an artificial hand that could hold, touch, and feel just like the hand you lost?"
As the famous publisher's well-chosen title Our World shows, this series is made up from the ideal viewpoint of world citizens, regardless of race, religion, or sex. If you missed seeing the publisher's name, you would not know in what country these books were published. In fact, despite the fact that the books were printed in the United States, people could believe that they came out in Japan because one of the authors is a Japanese woman named Yuko OKAMURA, and in the series there are pictures of a Japanese-style house, a Japanese traditional musical instrument shakuhachi, and a Japanese girl dancing the Bon festival dance.
The fact is, Our World series can be read with familiarity by any people all over the world just because these books mention your country and unique culture somewhere. Unlike the outdated 20th century English textbooks by pure white, English-speaking writers, this series is a work of worldwide collaboration for world citizens, focusing on a diversity of races and their cultures including white people in the United States and the United Kingdom instead of these native speakers of English and their Western civilization only.
Our World books consist mainly of old folktales and legends from around the world such as Hare Is Scared from Africa, Stone Soup from France, The Four Blind Men from India, Mouse Deer in the Rain Forest from Indonesia, The Mirror from Korea, The Empty Pot from China, Rhodopis from Egypt, The Green Rabbit from Mexico, How Tiger Got His Stripes from Vietnam, Two Brothers, Two Rewards from Japan, The Tailor and His Coat from Russia, and so forth. Compared with other publishers' series, these stories are freshly unknown to the average reader, so even adults will find them fascinating, impressed with their unique but understandable ways of thinking.
As supplements to the above-mentioned folk stories, modern-day, curious related facts are described with wonderful photographs at the last pages of each book. Whether young or old, you will realize that our world is quite interesting, surely wanting to know more about it through the international language, English.

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